The act of selecting a television program to watch has become more complicated in that the number of available channels has increased dramatically. For example RCA® DSS® direct broadcast satellite receivers provide more than 100 channels to choose from.
A user who wants to see “what's on” may consult a television schedule printed in his local newspaper in the hope that he would eventually find a program which sparked his interest. Such a practice may work well when there are only a few television channel schedules to examine, however, it is unlikely that a viewer would be able to examine the complete schedules for more than 100 television channels, just to see “what's on” at a given time. Such a task would be daunting even if all of the programs were to be listed by category. A viewer may find that there are only a few programs of interest to him out of the vast number of available programs. That is, the chaff outnumbers and tends to hide the wheat. Consequently, it is felt that as the number of channels increases, the chances of successfully locating a desirable program in a short time becomes more and more unlikely.
Wehmeyer et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,867,226, issued on Feb. 2, 1999, describes an apparatus for searching for specific television programs which satisfy certain criteria concerning a user's viewing preferences. Upon successful conclusion to the search, the apparatus generates a list of such television programs in order to predict for the viewer certain programs which may be of interest.
Also, in Maze, et al., U.S. application Ser. No. 08/687,285 (allowed on Oct. 24, 2000), an apparatus is provided for searching program listing for specific user-entered information, and the apparatus notifies the viewer of the availability of the programs by highlighting found programs within the program guide.